Bernd Koberling – Rooted In Time Rooted In The Sky, Paintings 1992-2026

Buchmann Galerie is pleased to present an exhibition with Bernd Koberling as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2026. This is the artist's first exhibition at the gallery. Bernd Koberling (born 1938) has been one of the most fascinating and distinctive voices in German painting for six decades. Born in Berlin and living there throughout his life, with brief exceptions, Koberling positioned himself early on with a figurative, expressive painting against the dominance of abstract art in the post-war period, thereby opening the path for the following generation of "Neue Wilde" painters in the 1980s. Around 1990, the artist moved away from the figurative furor of Neo-expressionism and devoted himself to an intensive engagement with painting as a carrier of expression between material, color, and form. At the center of his artistic exploration has always been the landscape as a complex, intensive field of experience. The experience of isolation in places like Iceland, which have preserved an original, uncultivated nature, forms the sensory resonance space of the artist's oeuvre. In this context, the painter masterfully plays with the contradiction between figuration and abstraction. His pictorial solutions make abstract elements visible within the figurative and, conversely, figurative aspects visible within the abstract. Koberling paints with the goal of "recreating an image from experiential power and what has been seen." The experience in the landscape thus becomes a central point of connection for his playful struggle to renew painterly possibilities. As a representative of a generation that still had to fight for or against abstraction in the post-war era, he frees himself from ideological attributions and steadfastly examines painting in the tension between renewal and preservation. Since 1977, his annual visits to Iceland have fundamentally influenced his work, with the island's raw landscape informing both his color palette and his approach to painting as a medium capable of capturing intense visual experiences. In works with titles such as "Erdstelle" (Earth Site), "Moosheidegestein" (Moss Heath Rock), or "Flussengel" (River Angel), it becomes evident that nature exists in a complex relationship to human existence. The treatment of this epistemological complexity gives his oeuvre a singular credibility that distinguished him from the crowd of participants in significant international exhibitions such as "A New Spirit in Painting" (London) and "Zeitgeist" (Berlin). The exhibition showcases large-format canvas works created by Koberling between 1994 and 2026, presented alongside an extensive series of watercolors. These watercolors are characterized by intense coloration, broad gestural brushwork, and a consistent pursuit of abstraction. As the artist himself has noted, "The more intimate the image, the coarser the means." These watercolor pieces form a substantial series of works, revealing the mystical and romantic undercurrents in Koberling's artistic sensibility.